


Traveling for One's Health

by tritonvert



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Canon Era, M/M, not really as much science or medicine or ghosts as there should be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-30
Updated: 2014-03-30
Packaged: 2018-01-17 12:26:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1387546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tritonvert/pseuds/tritonvert
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A summer visit to the Joly establishment in 1827.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Traveling for One's Health

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sath/gifts).



Paris.  August, 1827.

“So you’ve survived your first riot, my dear boy.  My dear _young man._ ”  Bahorel laughed and kissed Joly firm on the lips.  Catching something from Bossuet’s expression, Bahorel pulled _him_ into his bear’s grip next and distributed another deliberate kiss.  “And now Enjolras is quite right, you two had better go out of town for a few weeks.  Joly, your people are in Avignon, hey?” 

“Yes, but must we really?  My botanical lecture--”

“Avignon has flowers.  Gather your rosebuds there.  Or is it some other sort of flower you’re thinking of plucking?  Didn’t you say you met a girl this spring?  Something in the high-tempered line, Spanish or Italian or--”

“Her mother is Italian.  But as it happens, she’s from Avignon as well.”  Joly’s rumpled dignity had Bahorel laughing, and Bossuet as well.  But--

“This is no mere flower-picking, Bahorel, Joly is in earnest here.  He’s had a miniature portrait made to give this girl.  Who is, indeed, remarkable.”  A questioning look from Bahorel.  Bossuet ignored it.  “But do you really think we need to go?  You’re sure the police noticed us?”

“Very sure.”  Bahorel’s hand fell heavy on Bossuet’s shoulder.  “Your flight of oratory on the departed Deputy was brilliant, Laigle de Meaux, but it reached the wrong audience.  And Joly stands out in a crowd.  --For your elegant sense of fashion, Jolllly, for your impeccable taste.”

“I must make arrangements first--”

“Do it.”

They sent a letter ahead of them by a few hours to Joly’s family, a letter full of forgiving reproaches that the recipients had not replied to an earlier letter announcing his upcoming visit, a visit for the sake of his health.  Bossuet almost believed in this apocryphal  correspondence himself by the time Joly signed the letter.  The post was so unreliable these days!  

  


\--

 

Avignon.  


The Joly family had a library: naturally.  Their house had everything that was proper, everything that money could provide without _too_ obviously saying “hello, I’m money.”  Breakfast came with a view of the famous bridge (and when had Bossuet last gotten up and dressed so early?) and then the most senior Joly had invited his son’s friend in to the library to take a little coffee.  (Joly, damn his eyes, was not downstairs yet.  He had managed to develop a genuine cough.  His mother had brought up his breakfast herself.)

The coffee was scalding hot and Joly _père_ drank it untouched by cream or sugar.  Lesgle had taken his cup the same and was now trying to blow on it surreptitiously while fielding genial but probing paternal questions.  “Of course it was clear early on that Nathanaël was interested in scientific studies.  I didn’t choose to send my children away to school—I did not want them exposed either to the slights of schoolmasters who would see only their dark skin or to the practices that boys’ schools encourage—”  Lesgle, recalling one of his first and most astonishingly distracting conversations with Joly, spilled steaming coffee on his knuckles and bit down bad language.  Joly _père_ coughed and murmured an apology: “I mean only that it is an unhealthy environment for the young.  Whippings from the masters, eternal schoolboy joking and that cloistered culture, a Greek and Latin hot-house.  No, my boys studied with a schoolmaster here in town and we hired tutors who had traveled.  Who knew how the world turned beyond old _hic-haec-hoc._  He took his baccalaureate at an Avignon school. --So you can imagine it was a wrench to see him go away to Paris.”

Yes.  Lesgle could imagine.  He had a feeling the parents could imagine just as clearly at least some of the dissipations their son had found, newly-released on the city.  The father was continuing, now gazing out the window. “You’ll think I’m too protective.  But he’s our youngest, and he absorbs every passing enthusiasm.  I’m glad to see him meeting someone like you, a bit older, familiar with the city but steady—oh, tch, I know you boys will drink and find girls and see plays, there’s no preventing it, I was a sinner in my day—but it’s good that he’s made a place for himself with some gentlemen of firm character.  He’s mentioned a fellow medical student as well—do you know him?  Combeferre?  He sounds like another level-headed young man.”

Lesgle had no idea what he had done in the twelve hours since their arrival in Avignon to give the senior Joly an impression of level-headedness, but he vowed privately to maintain the image as best he could.  He gulped down a burning bitter mouthful of coffee as pre-emptive penance for any falsehoods he would utter over the next weeks, and began to speak earnestly of Combeferre.

 

\--

 

Lesgle found Joly in his room, fluffy-haired and wrapped in a green and gold banyan with a book on his knees.  He looked five years younger.  His smile was provoking.  “What have you been telling them about me?”

“Um?”

“Your father.  Your father thinks that I am a gentleman of firm character. Stop laughing.”  

“I told them you were two years older than me.  A law student.  That your father had been a post-master and that you were--were striking out on your own in the face of his loss--”  

Laigle de Meaux had been perched on the foot of Joly’s bed; now he flopped down in a leggy sprawl.  “You’re heartless.  Now I have a reputation to maintain.  --Hmm?”  Joly’s smile had faded.

“What else did my father say?”

“Oh...he was glad you were thriving in Paris.  Making friends.  Level-headed friends of good character who look out for your wellbeing.”  Lesgle felt that he was on uncertain ground here. Fathers and sons.  He was not ready to venture out on it, unsurveyed, too far.  He prodded the lump of Joly’s toes under the coverlet, by way of distraction.  “How is that terrible cough of yours?”

“ _Terrible._  I intend to stay in bed until at least noon, recruiting my strength.  Possibly until dinner.”

“It’s shocking how a journey by diligence exhausts one.  I can’t imagine how anyone actually travels _for their health._ ” said Lesgle mildly, and Joly kicked him.  “Not that I doubt the excruciating suffering of your...um. Lungs?”

“No, no, I have no reason to suspect pneumonia, not yet.  But my oropharynx is distinctly inflamed, and probably my laryngopharynx as well.”  He waved off-hand at the shaving mirror lying on his nightstand.

“Your poor chest.”

“Throat.”

“As you say.”  Joly had placed two fingertips just above Lesgle’s cravat, presumably making an anatomical point; Lesgle felt that his distraction had succeeded.

 

\--

 

They were sitting in the garden--Joly announced that his health allowed it, after four days reading in bed--sipping a kind of lemonade.  It had something in it, the juice of some unexpected fruit, or perhaps some combination of herbs--something Provençal?  Lesgle was savoring his glass and wondering whether Mme. Joly would share her recipe.  A splash of champagne wouldn’t hurt it at all…Courfeyrac would have some good ideas... Meanwhile, Joly read and Lesgle watched him read.  He had a mobile face.  Even dry medical texts brought out a collection of frowns and pursed lips and raised eyebrows and sometimes the sight of the tip of his tongue, caught between teeth in concentration.  Whatever this new monograph was, it had clearly pulled Joly in deep: while Lesgle sipped his lemonade and stretched his long legs, Joly had hunched gradually further and further forward in his seat.  His fingers were tangled in his hair.

When he looked up unexpectedly Lesgle could _almost_ have blushed for being caught staring.  “Bossuet.  Which direction is north?”

"Um."  He put down his glass and peered at the sky.  "Well.  It’s past noon, and the sun is _there_ , so that must be west?  And north would be…there?  More or less?  Why, were you reading that Englishman Shakespeare?  You are but mad north-north-west…”  Joly was tugging his chair around.  It left his back to Lesgle.  The reaction seemed extreme, but not everyone cared for English drama.

A minute later, Joly abandoned his chair, spread a handkerchief on the ground next to Lesgle and sat, still with his back to him, leaning his head on Lesgle’s knee.  He tilted his face back.  His curls tumbled onto Lesgle’s lap.  “ _A method in my madness,_ ” he said in barely-recognizable English.  “This letter Deleuze wrote to the Académie de Médecine--animal magnetism--it’s very convincing.  You know, I’ve had it sitting in my room for ages but I never bothered looking it over.  I thought it was all mesmerism--old stuff.  I used to read all about _that_ \--one of my old tutors left behind a book--and when I decided to devote myself properly to medicine, to science, I put it away as a childish thing.  But you know, it might not have been so childish.  Granted, I was looking for ghosts half the time then, but--”

“Ghosts?”  It was a charming notion.  But Joly seemed slow to answer his smile.

 

-

 

Stopping once by Combeferre’s room, Lesgle had thought it cluttered.  But Combeferre had nothing on the collections found in the former nursery- and school-room of a family with numerous children who had been largely educated at home.  

For one thing, Combeferre did not keep a parrot.  “He bites,” warned Joly, which seemed unnecessary.  Lesgle’s experience was that parrots always and invariably bit.  Granted, at the moment the parrot was nodding excitedly on its perch while Joly bobbed just as excitedly back at it.  “He bites but at least you can always tell when he’s going to do it,” he was saying.  “He nearly took the paw off a cat who tried to have a go at him.  She was my first patient.”

“Does it have a name?”  Lesgle was keeping his hands firmly in his pockets, but it seemed right to take an interest.  

“My brothers and sisters and I always called him Vercingetorix.  You see, we’ve made a thorough Gaul of him--he takes a drop of coffee in the morning and will do anything for a bit of brioche--and thus I suppose a Caesar of my father.”

“A pater familias, anyway.  You said you have three brothers?”

“And two sisters.  Some in France, some back in Martinique and Louisiana.  They are divided neatly amongst my father’s commercial interests and his religious interests.  Benoît and Henri are the commercial _And Sons_ of _Joly and Sons_ ; Claudette is married to the nephew of a business friend.”  He was counting them off briskly on his fingers. “Jean and Charlotte--for John and Charles Wesley, you understand--see to the spiritual needs of Nîmes.  But then there’s me.”

“You, ah, escaped the Wesleys?”

“Oh, not exactly.  Nathaniel Gilbert brought Wesley’s teachings to the West Indies, and I’m a Nathanaël-Gilbert.  My father was an enthusiastic convert in the early years.  He has subsided a bit since.”  Lesgle rubbed Joly’s shoulder.  He looked in need of sympathy.  “Sometimes I wonder whether the Libertés and Dix-Aoûts of the Year II would trade with me.”

“...I shall call you Liberté, if you like.  Or Dix-Août.  Or Égalité, Mort-aux-Tyrans...”

“You are a dear and loyal friend, Laigle de Meaux.”

“But your parrot disapproves.  Your parrot is a fearsome chaperone.”

“I’ve noticed.  Be easy, Vercingetorix.  Do not scrape your beak crossly on your perch.  Bossuet here is permitted to take liberties.”

“I am quite taken _with_ liberty, you could say.  I am a man devoted to liberty, I yearn for Liberté in my heart and in all my most private….but Jolllly, what were we looking for up here, again?”

“Um? --Oh.  Um.  We’re looking for the remains of my apparatus for hunting ghosts.  There are some instruments that I want.”

Joly’s further explanations left Lesgle no clearer in his mind. _A Goethe’s water barometer--oh, you know, it’s glass?  Shaped like a teapot?   And then there’s a few marine devices--another barometer, it’s much better, and a very fine compass--something good to be said for having a merchant father--my notions of ghost-hunting at age ten and eleven were quite unscientific--oh, look!  Look, that’s the model vegetable lamb of tartary I made for my museum.  See its clever little legs? I know it’s all rubbish but I came up with a theory when I was eight-- But right, it’s the compass I’m looking for.  And there should be a spool of copper wire--_

“But it’s _ghosts_ we’re after?”  Joly had been speaking at first of magnetism.  The connection was not immediately evident.

“Oh, no.  No. I am past that now.  Now I leave ghosts to Combeferre, mostly.  He takes strange fancies in the early hours of the morning after a dissection--ghosts, morals, the human faculty for love and physical desire, the nature of thought, hydras and animals in the deep ocean.  Too much hard studying, too much reading by candle-light.  I put a little borage in his wine once a week, and I watch him for signs of brain-fever.”

“Who has brain-fever?”  They had not heard Joly’s mother come in.  Lesgle became uncomfortably aware that he was halfway into a deep cabinet, on his knees, with his backside and worn-out boots on display.  He attempted to tuck in his rump and scuttle into a position that left his trousers less open to criticism.  Joly was already sitting cheerfully on the floor, waving a handful of dried moss at his mother.  The parrot preened its feathers.

“Combeferre.  Don’t worry, he doesn’t show any signs of it, not that I’ve seen.  I just keep an eye on him.  Feuilly, too--I’ve told you about Feuilly, Mother, haven’t I?  The one that makes fans and knows so much about Poland and Greece and all of that?  Feuilly is marvelous.”

She had put her basket down on the table near the parrot’s stand, and was bringing out needlework.  Most of it was Joly’s.  Lesgle recognized a pair of gloves, a waistcoat, and a pair of trousers with a narrow gold stripe.  The room faced west: good light for the late afternoon.  Mme. Joly asked after Combeferre and his risk of brain-fever, and what he had to say about the professor Joly had complained of in his last long letter…  The conversation veered somehow into gardening and the effects of soil quality on plants’ medicinal properties, then the relative merits (and dangers) of green and black teas, the sad business of Mère Colombe’s goddaughter, and whether or not the _Belle Eugénie_ would make it around Cape Horn another time.  Lesgle gave up following the conversational jumps--they were very Jolyesque, or was the word Jolaic?--and tried to make friends with the parrot.  It was not a successful venture.

Later, he regretted not entering more into their talk.  Mme. Joly was quiet in company, and up in the old schoolroom with her son was the most unreserved he ever saw her in conversation.  But he had no chance to make up for it.  The next day another Joly brother arrived.  This was Henri: and to Lesgle’s eye it seemed clear that this was a business reunion.  The generous thankings of God for safe travels and the warm embraces and earnest inquiries were much the same, but _his_ Joly coming home was the return of the baby of the family, much fussed over; _this_ Joly came home and their father drew him promptly into a close consultation about the price of sugar.  Henri barely had time to shake Lesgle’s hand before he was swept away.  “We have an hour or two before dinner, and I wanted to see what you thought about this proposal I’ve had from Beckney in London…”

 

\--

 

Dinners in the Joly household were taken under a very large family portrait.  In the foreground, father and mother and a small white-lace bundle of infant; flanking them, two boys and a green parrot, presumably Vercingetorix.  (Parrots lived forever, didn’t they?  They lived forever until they suddenly fell dead from unfathomable causes like chills or overindulgence in sweets.)  Father: clad in black, hand on a book, hair still more brown than grey, looking either stern or soulful.  Mother: the likeness not very good, a neutral expression under an elaborate high hat.  Scattered about them, hot-house plants and rugged crates, euphemistic representatives of colonial trade.  And for the background an enormous scene of a sinking ship and a man drifting in the water on a wooden crate.  

Lesgle had thought Joly was joking when he told him--apparently embarrassed by the whole business--that his father converted after one of his ships sank, leaving him adrift for a day and a night on a crate of English Methodist Bibles bound for Antigua.  He still thought someone was joking, surely.  A grand joke to end with this scene: Lègle de Meaux at the table of Joly and Sons--one out of the two incorporated And Sons, anyway--answering stern but kindly questions about his inheritance. (Tin mines in Brittany, of course.  A sure investment proposed by a dear old family friend.  M. Pontier still wrote every six months to let Lesgle know how the mines were going; so far they had produced some remarkable old stones carved with heathen gods, quite a lot of pottery and flint, and a single tin knife.  The hunting was said to be very good there, too, particularly the snipe).

 

\--

 

A little after breakfast Henri knocked on his brother’s bedroom door.  He found Lesgle sitting cross-legged on the foot of the bed, holding one of a pair of strong magnets.  “Good, good--I hoped to have a word with you both.  Put up your experiments a minute, brother?”

He had some of the same mobility of expression familiar to Lesgle on _his_ Joly’s face.  Now it was all sober scrutiny.  He nodded to himself before speaking again: “Well.  An odd thing happened to me the other day.  A man I’d never met approached me at a café in Paris, asking if I were M. Joly.  I told him yes; and he began to speak in a scattered sort of way about the funeral of Manuel.  The demonstrations.  He seemed to assume I knew all about it.” A shrug.  “He had an odd way of confiding.”

Lesgle and the younger Joly looked at one another.  Joly’s eyebrows had knit together in a worried line.  His brother went on to describe his visitor: no one familiar to them.  Lesgle turned to say as much, and realized that Henri was watching them with a faint smile.  “You know,” he said, “I’ve spent enough time in dockyards to recognize a fishy smell.  A police agent, was he?  Something like that?”

"I couldn’t imagine," answered Lesgle carefully.  

“No?  Well—it’s your business, you two.  But he was asking if I knew who had made that striking funeral oratory.  A man in a worn coat, tall, not much hair under his hat for all that he looked like a student.  Presumably he was seen in company with, say, ‘a young man of mixed race, heard by an informant to be called Joly,’ something like that.”

Lesgle looked down at the magnet in his lap.  “I can’t believe anyone would mistake you for me,” the younger Joly was saying.  “With your gawky long legs and your red hair--it is, it’s _almost_ red, anyway--and you’re ten years older--”

He was cut off when his brother reached over to ruffle his curls.  “It’s a good thing they did, though.  Whatever they’re about, the police don’t know as much as they think.  If they sort us out, well, I was in Calais the day of the funeral, and as far as anyone ought to be concerned, you were sick in bed or already on your way to Avignon.  Yes?  I doubt they’ll interview a dozen diligence drivers.  --But brother, political demonstrations at funerals?  And you’ve been in Paris less than a year.  I think your magnets and compasses will take you farther.”

 

\--

 

The next day Joly proposed a walk in the town.  Lesgle did not object in the slightest.  For one thing, he was desperate for a smoke. Tobacco was forbidden inside the Joly home.  

The walk only half occupied Joly’s attention, it was clear, though he dutifully pointed out all the expected sights between accounts of medicinal magnetic successes.  From the churches and papal palaces they came to the river and sat in the shade of the famous bridge.  Lesgle pulled out his pipe and prepared it with great relish.  Joly having forgotten his, they shared, staring at the river before them.  “The Rhône,” said Lesgle in a meditative voice.  Joly hmmed agreement.  He had run down like a watch, all talked out.  Lesgle would take a turn.  “It is too hot for me to pronounce upon it, today.  It is too hot and I am too comfortable.  I am moved by a simple sentiment of pleasure, and I give that pleasure a name: The Rhône.”  Joly hmmed again and passed back the pipe.  They watched a rowboat move along the far shore.  “Joly?”  Another small noise.  “Joly, did you really look for ghosts here?  I cannot picture it.”

Joly was silent.  A glance showed Lesgle that he was studying the head of his cane.  (It was carved in ivory, with two chips of glass, the head of a pink-eyed white rabbit.  Lesgle borrowed it at every opportunity.)  

“Ought I not to ask?”

“No, no, it’s all right.”  Joly reached for the pipe, and took a few thoughtful puffs, still quiet.  

Lesgle took up the conversational burden again.  “Myself, I tried to hunt ghosts in an abandoned mill just outside of Meaux.  It was a popular drowning spot.  Some people blamed accident, drink, poverty, despair, and the poor outlook for unmarried girls ‘in trouble,’ but an older school of thought blamed a white lady who wore dripping green water-weeds and beckoned to unfortunates.  She was supposed to appear in a top room of the mill, and to sing.  The night I went looking for her--mere curiosity--I arrived to find the mill in the process of burning down, and the whole town watching.”

“Did the drownings stop?”

“Not at all.”

“Ah.”

Lesgle thought that the ghost question had been settled.  Perhaps it was a sensitive point for Joly, who had many sensitive points.  But after a pause to listen to a thrush Joly spoke again.  “Yes, I did go looking for ghosts here.  I filled a notebook with observations and profound thoughts and kept it hidden under a rock.   It was just one ghost, really.  You remember that Avignon is where they killed Brune?  Marshal Brune, I mean.  After the Hundred Days.”  Lesgle had not remembered.  He coughed noncommittally.  “Oh, _you_ know.   _Brune._  He was an old revolutionary, much too republican for Bonaparte’s comfort but they both liked the Bourbons less.  He kept the tricolor flying down in Toulon for two weeks after Bonaparte surrendered to the English?”

“ _Buonaparte,_ Enjolras would say. --No, I’m afraid my political opinions at the time were sadly underdeveloped.  Louis XVIII made my father’s fortune with that post office and we were thorough royalists when we came to Meaux.  I did not hear stories about old republicans holding fast to the tricolor.”  He thought suddenly of the family portrait in the dining room: the formative moment of the House of Joly.  His family should have had a splendid scene of an anxious sandy-haired man petitioning an equally anxious (and somewhat seasick) king.  From that day forth, all glory to the name of Bourbon!  Well, he had signed away that hypothetical portrait in exchange for tin mines in Brittany.  “But I did hear about a rascal general being turned out of Toulon and killed, now that I think of it.  And of course Marshal Ney, later.”  

“Yes.  Well.  This is where they killed Brune.”  Joly pointed back towards the town with his cane.  “He had surrendered.  He was on his way to Paris with his aides-de-campe, under safe passage.  They reached the town walls on the second of August...they had to change horses, you see, and were held up until a crowd of royalists formed.  There was some back-and-forth, an innkeeper tried to provide refuge and the crowd gathered fuel to set fire to the hotel--”  He broke off and studied his cane again.  “Mind you, my father kept the whole family indoors at the first sound of trouble.  Not our affair.  We heard the particulars after from the mayor, who was my father’s friend.  He tried to stop the crowd, he said, but they were very fierce.  For some time they had Brune and his men holed up--Brune took a glass of wine and wrote off a letter to his wife--people were shouting that he had murdered the princesse de Lamballe, carried her head on a pike, which was nonsense--a porter and a handful of men came into the room, Brune faced them, they had a pistol at his breast--it misfired--they shot him in the back…”  Joly had pulled up his knees, tucked them under his chin.  “They wanted the mayor to sign a paper finding the death a suicide.  Things got too hot for him when he refused, and he hid in his office.  The crowd tore into Brune’s coach--someone stole his boots, I have heard--and after a scuffle over whether the town officers could decently bury the body the crowd dragged it off, stabbed it a hundred times, and threw it into the river.  This Rhône here.  When the body came up to the surface, showing the general’s sash and medals, the bright lads of the town kept up a target practice for over an hour.  It was days before they’d let anyone fetch the body out of the river.  --A gardener went out in a boat and got it.  He said you could barely tell it had been human. As you might expect, after all that.”

Lesgle could no longer bear this narrative, was unnerved by Joly’s usual scatter of speech but in an unfamiliar remote voice.  He was already sitting shoulder to shoulder with Joly, who seemed to wince away from the comfort; he curled up and nudged his head onto Joly’s knee until comfort was forced upon him.  Eventually their pipe went out, and Lesgle busied himself with lighting it again.  He hardly knew what to make of the story.  Perhaps he didn’t need to make anything of it at once.  With his head in Joly’s lap he watched the wisps of smoke disperse.

“I believe his godson is in Paris now.  He’s a writer, I met him once, Prouvaire talked me into going to some salon.  The son of the great General Dumas,  you know?  The black general.  Brune and Dumas were very close.”   Joly took the pipe.  “I think we should return.  You don’t see Bahorel lying low, and I’m sure the police have his name a dozen times over.”

 

\--

 

Their walk home was silent, but as they packed the next day, filling a borrowed extra trunk with Joly’s magnets and glassware and wires, Joly seemed himself again.  He outlined the new plan, a plan in accordance with his most recent reading.  He would study this magnetic science with an eye to its medical applications--no superstition but no half measures either--try it himself--why, when you thought of all the time spent asleep in bed, essentially immobile, and you imagined the harm that could be done to the body through the misorientation of the magnetic fluids--a matter of movement and circulation--they would move the bed, certainly, and perhaps the chaise longue and the easy chair as well, and what about the table? A study of the digestive processes-- For purposes of experimentation, he and Bossuet ought to sleep in opposite directions for a time, head and toe--they could discover whether the head was better oriented north or south or east or west--he should make some methodical attempts at manipulating the vital fluids as well: if Bossuet didn’t mind volunteering?  It would be quite painless, a matter of laying on hands.  To which he did not expect objections, but he thought he ought to ask--but just think, if they could cure people without cutting into them and turning them inside-out with purgatives--if something as simple as moving one’s bed at night could prevent suffering-- they had doctors treating patients this way already, they had patients treating themselves in the privacy of their families.  Why should the Academy hold itself aloof?  Was healing sick people their business or not?  Or did they just not like to change their minds? --France did not need the Academy’s permission to heal itself--

Lesgle tried to follow, but finally raised his hands in submission.  “I give up.  I am a dunce.  You will have to educate me in simple words, poor schoolboy that I am.”

  


\--

 

Paris.

 

In the city a week later, Joly and Lesgle were ready to spread apart, as was only to be expected after several days jostled together in a diligence.  They huffed and squabbled together until all of Joly’s luggage was in his room, and then Lesgle announced that he’d go and see if Grantaire or anyone were to be found with an empty bed.  “I know you’re eager to find out if Musichetta liked your portrait.”  “Yes.  In fact.  I am, rather.”  “I’ll see you at the Musain or the Corinthe, then.”  “Right.”  “I won’t shave off the beard, Joly.”  “Oh, _of course_ you won’t.  You have no decency.”  “Precisely.  It is a measure against the bourgeois.”

It turned out that Grantaire was unresponsive to hammering on his door and Courfeyrac already had company.  Bahorel then: he was home, he was alone, he was happy to clear off his couch.  “But the police are still sniffing around.  I thought you’d be in Avignon at least till the end of term.  Didn’t get on with his family?”

“We got on splendidly.  Lovely people.”

“Well?  --Is it the girl?  Is Joly that far gone on her, or is there something else to it…?”

“You are a gossip.  Shame, Bahorel.  Shame.”

“You’re as bad.  If you don’t tell me, I’ll start to speculate.”  Bossuet tried to collect his thoughts, but Bahorel was too quick.  “Let me guess.  You made a pass at her and Joly found out, and he can’t make up his mind whether to like it or not.  Or is it--”

“Actually, Bahorel, if you must know, we felt the call of solemn patriotic duty.”

“Ha! you and Joly _solemn_.”  

“Solemn as anything.  A fierce determination fell upon us as we contemplated our Patria and the great sacrifices that she had once demanded and may yet demand of those who hold her future dear.”

“Ah, I bet it was the girl.”

  


\--

 

It took them six days to find one another again at the Musain and go home.  Joly was intent on his plan of study: so Bossuet had his head to the north and Joly his head to the south.  A triangle gaped dark between the bed, the nightstand, and the wall.  At least one book had already slid into that abyss and Bossuet had the feeling his pillow would as well.  He wedged it more firmly under his neck.  

“Joly?”

“Mm?”

“Do you feel better, sleeping like this?”

“I am trying not to make conclusions before completing the experiment.  It’s more scientific.”

“Oh, quite.”  He nudged his pillow again.  “But Joly…”

“Mm.”

“I was thinking about your ghost.”

“I told you, I don’t believe in that anymore.”

“I know, but--”  The absurdity was too much; he sat up.  After a moment Joly sat up as well, the sheet crumpling between them.  “--but Jolllly, you don’t think I am laughing at you about it?”

“You may if you want.  I have already amused several of my fellow students with my magnetic discourse.  It’s all of a piece with ghosts.  And evil humors.  And old women casting a hex on their neighbors’ cows.  I shall make a fine _doctor against witch-craft_ , I am told.”

Oh.  Lesgle opened his mouth and closed it again, at a loss.  Surely he had not been laughing.  Not literally _laughing._  Not very much?  Only just before getting into bed, and that was because Joly had been breathing on his toes and it was a silly way to sleep--  And perhaps once or twice in the diligence when he suddenly thought what Musichetta might have to say about rearranging beds.  No more than that.  Though arguably there were times he had, for example, offered a conversational diversion when attention would have suited better. “They are asses over at the medical school,” he said finally.  “Some of them.  And--and it is just possible that at times I may have been a bit of an ass myself.  Partially.  Perhaps like Midas I have ass’s ears.  I make no claims as to the rest of my anatomy; I defer to your judgment.  --But Joly, I really was thinking about your ghost.  Brune.  It’s quite a story.  You were, what, ten?”

“It was just before my birthday.”  His voice was still wary in the dark.  Lesgle frowned, and crawled across the creaking mattress to lie down again, this time aligned more favorably with Joly.  Going to bed in novel positions was one thing, but he liked to speak tête-à-tête when he could.  Joly made room after a moment.

“You are disrupting my science.”

“I hope not.  Though I do worry that we will magnetize opposite to one another, sleeping the wrong way around. --Did you ever see anything?”

“No.  Once I did see a mist behaving very oddly on the surface of the water, but it was a rough thundery night.  Some effect of temperature and pressure.”  Lesgle nodded against his shoulder.  He would have to learn more about temperature and pressure, and their effects.   “I don’t mind leaving Brune to his rest, Bossuet.  I don’t _need_ a ghost.  My life is quite complete in Paris.  But thank you for humoring me.”

“I wasn’t...”

“You were, a bit.”  Lesgle could not find the right words to deny it, so he began wriggling back around to his end of the bed.  It was the least he could do in the name of science.

A surprisingly decisive arm wrapped around his chest and locked him in place.  “I didn’t say to _stop_ humoring me.”  There was nothing reserved in Joly’s voice now.  “Or whatever it is that you do, if it isn’t humoring me.  You are allowed liberties.  --But humor me now by remaining in this orientation.  As you say, a permanent misalignment would be a very sad outcome.  We will not allow it.  Stay just where you are. I intend to lecture you on the nature of magnetic attraction.”

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to septembriseur and pilferingapples for beta-ing and for putting up with me being cranky and querulous. I'm afraid this ended up much shorter on science and period medicine than it ought to have been, but there is 100% more Dumas family than expected.
> 
> \--The account of Brune's death comes mostly from the obsessively-detailed French Wikipedia article. Guillaume Brune was first a journalist and then a military officer during the French Revolution. He was close to Desmoulins and Danton--and then to total bad-ass General Dumas. His murder in Avignon was one of the many deaths during the White Terror that began the Bourbon Restoration.
> 
> \--Joly and Bossuet are lying low after the funeral of liberal deputy Manuel, which turned into a huge demonstration in the Père Lachaise cemetery. I don't know that it was really a riot but Bahorel is being generous.


End file.
